Angelina Jolie's Scrapped CLEOPATRA Movie Was a "Love Affair" Epic "Political Thriller With Assassinations and Sex" That Was Almost Finished

The Cleopatra movie starring Angelina Jolie was announced over a decade ago, and it went through many phases of development, with several big names attached to create it, but it stopped just short of completion before ultimately being scrapped.

The movie was part romance epic and part “political thriller with assassinations and sex,” according to the movie’s original screenwriter Brian Helgeland.

The Oscar-winning Jolie was set to play the Egyptian queen in a tentpole for Sony Pictures that once courted directors David Fincher, Ang Lee, and Martin Scorsese to helm. But it never exactly got off the ground.

Helgeland said in an interview with Inverse (via Variety):

“I was the very first writer on ‘Cleopatra’ when it was being developed for Angelina Jolie to star in, which was almost made. It had elements of a political thriller with assassinations and sex, but it’s an epic that’s divided between her love affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony. Lots of true events surprised me when I was writing it.”

He went on:

“For example, the day Caesar was assassinated — the Ides of March and all that stuff — she was in Rome. They were leaving for Egypt, and the reason why they had to kill him at that time was because he was headed out of town with her. That’s historically true and featured in the script. She writes Marc Antony’s speech — ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’ — because he doesn’t know what to say, but she tells him what to say. It’s sort of her way of saying ‘fuck you’ to those guys because she’s smart enough and he’s not.”

Hollywood has long struggled to get a Cleopatra movie into production following Elizabeth Taylor’s infamous 1963 epic, which had such an enormous budget that it nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins was developing a new Cleopatra movie for Gal Gadot a few years ago, while Dune filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has long wanted to make his own Cleopatra movie.

The latter project appeared to get a promising development update when reports surfaced earlier this year that 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns was writing Villeneuve’s movie.

Back in May 2011, Jolie herself said in an interview with The Telegraph that she was hoping her Cleopatra movie would be an accurate portrayal of the historical icon. She said:

“She has been very misunderstood. I thought it was all about the glamour, but then I read about her and she was a very strong mother, she spoke five languages and she was a leader. My performance will never be as lovely as Elizabeth’s. We are trying to get into a different truth about her as a pharaoh in history and not as a sex symbol, because she really wasn’t … Even this idea of her having many lovers – it was possible that it was only two. She is very interesting, but she wasn’t a great beauty.”

When exactly Villeneuve might go into production on his own Cleopatra movie remains to be seen. The filmmaker has several high profile projects currently in development, including a third Dune movie with Legendary Entertainment.